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A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Director: Richard Linklater

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From Time Out London

When, towards the end of ‘A Scanner Darkly’, a character conspiratorially confides that ‘the whole process is hidden behind the surface of our reality,’ he’s talking about the industrial manufacture of narcotics, but it takes only the smallest of synaptic leaps to apply his words to the socio-politics of the world he lives in, and the production of the film itself. Closely adapted from a novel by Philip K Dick – in whose work the daily experience of future life is frequently exposed as a strategically constructed tissue of mollifying deception – ‘Scanner’ is set ‘seven years from now’ in a Los Angeles where a quarter of the population is dependent on the powerful and ultimately lethal mind-bender Substance D. It’s a police state in which unaccountable authority is maintained through hypersurveillance and the cultivation of multiple strata of crippling paranoia, to which many citizens’ understandable response is a retreat from the world and even the self – a schism reflected on a formal level by a more subtle and sophisticated version of the digital rotoscoping technique Linklater used in 2001’s ‘Waking Life’, whereby live-action is rendered as eerily beautiful painted animation.By turns amusing, unsettling and baffling, the skittish story centres on McDad-turned-dropout Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) who, in his alternative identity as a deep-cover drugs agent known as ‘Fred’, is charged with monitoring a gaggle of deadbeat D-users, including two-faced motormouth James Barris (Robert Downey, Jr), wild-eyed space cadet Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson), ostensibly more self-possessed dealer Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder) and, er, McDad-turned-dropout Bob Arctor. This Möbius strip of an assignment turns out to be pretty typical of LA, 2013, where intolerable pressures bear on atomised minds. Dick’s title is a reference to the chapter in Corinthians in which St Paul suggests that, in this world, ‘we see through a glass, darkly’ – an image of incomplete comprehension deployed in the service of a plea to embrace charity. That attribute is absent here: a friend in need is a cause for suspicion, the abduction of an innocent fellow-citizen a cue to look the other way. Here, there really is no such thing as society.Rather than a garish dystopia, then, ‘Scanner’ offers the banality of fascism. Where other filmed Dick stories – ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Total Recall’ and ‘Minority Report’ being the most prominent – have gone to great lengths to fashion exotic future worlds packed with bleeding-edge eye candy, Linklater serves up a disarmingly familiar milieu with only a smattering of hi-tech magic, related to modes of perception and integrated into the animated mise en scène. Most impressive is the ‘scramble-suit’ worn by Arctor-as-Fred: designed to stymie face-recognition sensors, it’s a constantly shifting mask of fractured features which at any one time might resemble, say, the eyes and nose of an African American girl and the jawline of an Asian grandfather. It’s a local version of the rotoscoping technique with which the whole movie is stamped – a recognisable but fundamentally unreliable version of the real, it’s an apt expression of the pervasive uncertainty of the setting. It’s also wondrously attractive, all the more so for the avoidance (with one or two exceptions) of extrovert ‘Waking Life’-style set-pieces.The casting is spot-on. Even on a good day, Reeves struggles to seem entirely certain of who he is, where he is and what he’s doing there, and his air of hazy befuddlement is perfect for the increasingly cracked Arctor. That many of the rest of the cast have established track records of enthusiastic substance experimentation adds another layer. Part of Dick’s point is the reduction of discourse to banality and, when Downey’s Barris is on screen, the film can feel like being stuck in a lift with a crank. Even when he’s not, it’s a very talky film: this may be the future, but it’s a future realised by the Linklater of ‘Slacker’ and ‘Before Sunrise’, and the emphasis is on opinionated stoners in slovenly tract housing, not flying cars and laser fights. The narrative is also a slippery prospect, as scrambled and frustrating as Fred’s mask – but then that’s only fitting for a film about fake impostors with lives that feel like movies shot on CCTV.

Author: Ben Walters 2006-08-14 13:00:33

Time Out London Issue 1878

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User reviews of this film

Technoguy said...

Posted on Jan 09 2008 15:21 Dick filtered rather than filletted and all the better for it.The illusion of rotoscoping layed over the delusional paranoid perceptions of it's main characters. Dick finally gets the treatment he deserves. A highly manufactured artefact: after filming it took 18 months to animate. The excellent acting shines through the well drawn craftsmanship.The surveillance society with the lubrication of paranoia fuelled the machine of Nixon's America, which Dick(whose home had been broken into and papers taken)was the subject of, often high on amphetamines. The loss of civil liberties can be updated to our own times to protect us from terrorism. Truth becomes relative and multiperspectival. We see the collapse of identity and brain cells under the onslaught of substance D. This layered tapestry depicts the tragi-comedy of drug-fuelled psychosis, set subtly in the future. As with Carlos Casteneda's story it teaches us to hold firmly onto our objectivism less hands mouth teeth eyes mind go up in smoke. Do the scanners see into our hearts or into our heads Keanu Reaves' character asks. The unity of embodied intelligence is seen through a glass darkly and fractures into a million trips. Science fiction turned inwards was far more what Dick was about(forget Blade Runner, Total Recall & Minority Report). This film has far more in common with Gilliam's Fear & Loathing and Naked Lunch. See it on the big screen for the best effect. They've made films out of graphic comics and novels. Now a sci-fi novel has been transformed into a graphic animation. Welcome to the future. Of course if you've read the book you will also realize that the Newpath project which manufactures and distributes the all-pervasive Substance-D are trying to destroy people's identities so they can manipulate the whole population. The film brings out how the police are not aware of the higher up honchos intentions, hence the use of the scramble suit to deceive one level of authority by another. At the end the sobered up Reeves' character is sublininally aware when he sees the blue flowers of substance D spread out in the rows of corn that what is truly happening is far beyond what anyone could ever believe. He saves a blue flower in his boot to show his friends.

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